Manisa
— — the city the Ottoman princes were sent to learn to govern.
Not only on a wall.
“A provincial capital in western Turkey, set on the plain where the Gediz River runs down toward the Aegean. Mount Spil rises above the old town in pine and rock; the carved face the Hittites left on its flank is one of the oldest monumental portraits in the eastern Mediterranean. The Muradiye complex still holds its sixteenth-century courtyards, and every spring the city throws handfuls of mesir paste from the minaret of the Sultan Mosque.
Manisa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Manisa is the capital of Manisa Province in Turkey's Aegean Region, set on the Gediz Plain about 40 kilometres northeast of İzmir at the foot of Mount Spil. The city's population is around 400,000. It sits on what classical writers called Magnesia ad Sipylum, has changed hands among Lydians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, the Beylik of Saruhan, and Ottomans, and has been a centre of olive, sultana, and tobacco trade for the western Anatolian plain since antiquity.
The mountain above the city carries the Taş Suret, the so-called Weeping Rock of Niobe and, in a separate niche, a seated figure cut into the cliff that scholars identify as a Hittite mother goddess dating to roughly the thirteenth century BCE. In town, the Muradiye Mosque and its complex of 1585, attributed to the workshop of Mimar Sinan, holds a courtyard of pale stone and a tiled mihrab considered one of the finest provincial works of late-classical Ottoman architecture.
Every spring, on a date set around the equinox, the city stages the Mesir Macunu Festival, an unbroken tradition documented since 1539. From the balconies and the minaret of the Sultan Mosque, attendants throw small packets of mesir paste, a confection of forty-one spices and herbs first prepared by the court physician Merkez Efendi to cure the sultan's mother, Ayşe Hafsa Sultan. UNESCO inscribed the festival on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012.